The Arts and Their Mission

Schmidt Number: S-5303

On-line since: 15th March, 2007

V

I

SHOULD like to supplement last week's lectures on art. Often I had
to emphasize that the spiritual evolution of mankind has proceeded from
the unity of science, art and religion. In present-day spiritual life we
have science, art and religion separated, yet can look back into the time
when these three streams flowed from a common source. That source is seen
most clearly if we go back four or five thousand years to poetry during
the primeval ages; or, rather, to what would today be called poetry. To
fathom the poetry of the bearers of ancient culture (it is nonsense,
our looking for this culture in present-day primitive peoples) we must
study the spiritual development of mankind in those ancient times through
the Mysteries.

Let us
examine the times when human beings did not look to the earth, but out
into the cosmos to find a content for their spiritual life, or to satisfy
the deepest needs of their souls. At that period those with clairvoyant
faculties, seeing the fixed stars and movements of the planets, considered
everything on earth a reflection of events taking place in its cosmic
environment. We need only remind ourselves how the ancient Egyptians
measured by the rising of Sirius the significance for their lives of
the river Nile; how they considered the Nile's influence a result of
what could be fathomed only by studying the relationship between stars
out there in the cosmos. To the Egyptians their interplay in cosmic
space was mirrored, on earth, by the activity of the Nile. This is but
one example among many. For the conception held sway that occurrences
in definite locations on earth imaged forth the observable mysteries
of the starry heavens. We must also be clear about the fact that in
ancient times human beings beheld in the heavens things quite different
from those now being investigated and calculated with so-called
astro-mechanics and astro-chemistry.

Today
we shall direct our attention to the way people expressed themselves
through poetry during the period when they received spiritual content
for their souls in the manner described.

I refer
to an age when all the arts, except poetry, were but little developed.
The other arts existed, to be sure, but in only a rudimentary state
because the human beings of that time were deeply conscious of the fact
that with the word, created out of their organisms' innermost secret,
they could express something super-sensible, that language was fitted
to express what appears in star-constellations and star-movements; far
better fitted than the art-mediums using substances taken directly from
the earth. For language originates in spiritual man — this they
felt — and is therefore eminently adapted to what, from cosmic
reaches, manifests here on earth. Poetry, then, was not an offspring
merely of phantasy but of spiritual perception; and it was by this means
that man learned what he in turn poured into the other arts. Poetry,
which finds expression through words, was the medium by which man entered
into soul-communion with the stars, the extra-earthly.

This soul-communion
constituted the poetic mood. Through it man saw how thoughts not yet
separated from objects gain pictorial expression in his vault-like head,
a head resembling the firmament; how thought represents a spiritual
firmament, a celestial vault; how thought is inherent throughout the
cosmos. Individual thoughts were expressed through the relative positions
of the stars, by the way the planets moved past each other. In those
ancient times man — unlike the free man of a later age — did
not think merely by virtue of his own inner force. In every
thought-movement he felt the after-image of some star-movement, in every
thought-form the after-image of a constellation. Thus his thinking
transported him into stellar space. The sunlight which illumined the day,
and which would seem to be blinding out in the cosmos, was not considered
the guide to wisdom, not the guiding force of thought, but, rather,
sunlight as reflected by the moon. The following is ancient Mystery
wisdom: During the day we see light with the physical body, at night we
do more; we see it gathered up by the silver chalice of the moon. And
this sunlight, collected by the moon, was regarded as the soul's Soma
drink. Enspirited thereby, the soul could conceive those thoughts which
were the result, the image, of the starry heavens.

Thus man as thinker felt as though the force of his thinking were
located not in his earthly organism, but out where the stars were circling
and forming constellations; he felt his soul poured out into the entire
universe. If he had investigated combinations and separations of
thoughts, he would have looked, not for laws of logic, but for the paths
and constellations of the stars in the nightly firmament. The laws and
images of his thinking existed in the heavens.

When he
became aware of his feeling, it was not the abstract feeling of which
we speak today in our abstract time, but rather the concrete feeling
closely united with such inner experiences as that of breathing and
blood circulation, the vital interweaving of the interior of the human
body. Thus he felt himself existing not only upon the physical earth,
but in planetary space. He did not say: In the human organism millions
of blood corpuscles circle, but rather: Mercury and Mars are crossing
Sun and Moon. To repeat: he felt his soul poured out into the universe;
felt that, while with his thoughts he abode among the fixed stars and
their constellations, with his feelings he lived within the sphere of
the moving planets. Only with his will did he feel himself on earth.
Considering the terrestrial an image of the cosmic he said to himself:
When the forces of Jupiter, Moon, Venus and Sun strike the earth and
penetrate its soil in the solid, liquid and aeroform elements, then
from these elements will impulses penetrate into the human being, just
as thought impulses penetrate into him from the fixed stars, and feeling
impulses from planetary movements.

By such
awareness, man could transplant himself into the time of the beginnings
of primeval art. What is primeval art? It is nothing other than speech
itself (a fact little understood today). For our speech is fettered
to the material-earthly; it no longer manifests what it was when human
beings, feeling transported into the Zodiac, incorporated into themselves
from zodiacal constellations the twelve consonants, and from the movements
of the planets past the fixed-star constellations, the vowels. At that
time human beings did not intend to express through speech what they
experienced upon earth, but rather what the soul experienced when it
felt transported into the cosmos; which is why, in ancient times, speech
flowered into poetry. The last remnants of such poetry are contained
in the Vedas and, more abstractly, in the Edda. These are after-images
of what, in greater glory, in much greater sublimity and majesty, had
arisen directly out of the formation of languages during those ages
when human beings could still feel their own soul life intimately united
with cosmic movement and experience.

What
is felt of all this in present-day poetry?

Poetry
would not be poetry — and in our time much poetry is no longer
poetry — if certain aspects of man's communion with the cosmos
had not been kept. What remains is whatever in speech-formation passes
beyond the prose meanings of words into rhythm, rhyme and imagination.
For true poetry never consists of what is stated literally. Into the
prose content of a poem, whether written down or, better, recited or
declaimed, there must sound rhythm, beat, imagination. This points to
elements not contained in prose; to a background which, in every true
poetic work, cannot be understood but must be guessed at, divined. It
is only the prose content which can be understood by the mind. The fact
that poetry conveys something lying outside its words, for which the
words are but a means, the fact that poetry's aura of mood echoes cosmic
harmony, melody, imagination, this fact, even today, makes poetry poetry.
We still can divine what it meant for Homer when he said: “Sing,
oh Muse, the wrath of Achilles, son of Peleus.” It was not the
poet singing; it was the soul which has communion with cosmic movements
singing through him. In the planets live the Muses. The epic
Muse lives in one particular planet. It was into this planet that Homer
felt transported: Sing, oh Muse, resound for me, celestial melody of
the planets; relate the deeds of earthly heroes, Agamemnon, Achilles,
Odysseus, Idomeneus, Menelaus; sing of how events appear, not from the
limited standpoint of earth, but when the gaze is directed from stellar
space. Could one ever believe that the magnificent, comprehensive images
of the Iliad stemmed from a “frog-perspective”? No,
they have not even air-perspective; they have star-perspective. For
that reason, the Iliad story could not be told as though man
had solely to do with man, for the gods influence actions; side by side
with human agents, they perform their deeds. This is not frog-perspective,
this is the stellar-perspective to which the soul of the poet longed
to rise when he said: “Sing, oh Muse, the wrath of Achilles, son
of Peleus.”

From all
this it can be clearly seen that the earthly medium which art —
in the present case, poetry — makes use of is only a means to
an end. The artistic element comes from treating the medium in such
a way that the spiritual background, the spiritual worlds, may be divined;
word, color, tone, form, being but pathways. If we wish to reawaken
in mankind the true artistic mood, we must, to a certain degree, transport
ourselves back into those ancient times when the celestial, the poetic
mood, lived in the human soul. Then we will receive an impression of
how best to use other media to carry art to the world of the spirit;
which is what must happen if art wants to be art. Today our feeling
has coarsened; we no longer sense what, in the not so distant past,
has made art what it is.

For example,
say that we see a mother carrying a little child: an elevating sight.
We are familiar with the fact that the immediate form impression received
therefrom is fixed only for a moment. The very next moment the mother's
head position changes, the child in the mother's arms moves. What we
have before us in the physical world is never still very long. Now let
us look at
Raphael's
Sistine Madonna:
the Mother and Child. Now, an
hour from now, a year from now, it remains what it was; nothing has
changed, neither child nor mother move. The moment has been fixed. That
which in the physical world is still only a moment is here, so to speak,
paralyzed. But it only seems so. Today we no longer feel what
Raphael
most certainly felt, asking, Am I allowed to do that? to fix with my
brush a single moment? It is not a lie to convey an impression that
the mother holds her child in the same manner today as yesterday? Is
it right to impose upon anybody a prolongation of one particular moment?
At present such a question appears paradoxical, even nonsensical. But
Raphael
asked it. And what answer arose in him? This artistic obligation:
You must atone in a spiritual way for your sin against reality,
must lift the moment out of time and space, for within time and space
it is a palpable untruth; must, through what you paint on the plane
of your canvas, bestow eternity, arouse feelings which transcend the
earthly plane.

This is
what is called today, abstractly,
Raphael's
idealistic painting. His
idealism is his justification for so unnaturally fixing the moment.
What he invokes through the depths of his colors, through color harmony,
he attains by precluding — spiritualizing — the third
dimension. His use of colors elevates to the spiritual what is otherwise
seen, materialistically, in the third dimension. Thus that which is not on
but behind the plane through blue, not on but in front of the plane
through red, that which steps out of the plane in a spiritual way (whereas
the third dimension steps out of the plane only in a material way),
bestows eternity on the moment. Which is precisely what must be bestowed
upon the moment. Without the eternal, art is not art.

I have
known people — artists, mainly — who hated
Raphael.
Why? Because they could not understand what is stated above; because they
wanted to stop short with an imitation of what the moment presents but
which, the next moment, is gone. Once I became acquainted with a
Raphael
hater who saw the greatest progress in his own painting in the fact
that he was the first who had dared to stop sinning against nature;
that is, had dared to paint all the hairy spots of the naked body really
covered with hair. How inevitable that a man who considered this great
progress should have become a
Raphael
hater. But the episode also shows
how badly our time has forsaken the spirit-borne element in art, the
element which knows why painting is based on the plane. Spatial perspective
must be comprehended; it was necessary in our freedom-endowed fifth
post-Atlantean period to learn to understand spatial perspective, that
which conjures up on the plane not the pictorial, but the sculptural.
The real thing, however, is color-perspective which over-comes the third
dimension not by foreshortening and focusing, but by a soul-spiritual
relationship between colors, say, between blue and red, or blue and
yellow. Painting must acquire a color-perspective which overcomes space
in a spiritual fashion. Thus can the artistic be brought back to what
it was when it linked man directly to spiritual worlds.

At that time
man felt the harmony between science, religion and art. This perception
must again be aroused. An echo of it lived in Goethe; that was what
made him so great. True, man in his freedom had to experience those
three as separated: science, art, religion. But the division has made
him lose the profundity of all three; above all, he has lost communion
with the cosmos.

One need only
exaggerate today's relation between art and science, between poetry
and science. You may say I need not carry the problem to extremes to
show the contemporary mis-relationship between poetry, art and science.
But in a radical case the whole mis-relationship becomes clear. So I
cite a radical case:

Once,
in a certain city, there took place a meeting of scientists to discuss
some great materialistic problems. You know the tremendous seriousness
with which such meetings deal with scientific problems; a seriousness
so great, no individual dares to approach it with his personality. He
therefore places a lectern in front of him, lays his manuscript on it,
and reads a paper; or rather, one scientist after another reads a paper.
Personality is shoved aside. So strongly does this seriousness act,
it is withdrawn from the individual and placed on the lectern; extremely
serious! At such meetings every face looks grave. To be sure, they look
like reflections of the lectern; but very serious indeed! At this
particular meeting the chairman turned to a group of poets with the
request that they create, out of their art, poems which could be launched,
between courses, at the banquet to follow. Thus the gentlemen —
perhaps there were also ladies — went from this serious meeting to
a dinner party where poems were presented making fun, satirically, of the
various sciences. You see the misrelation between science and art. First
the scientists dealt very seriously with the position of a June bug's
mandible, or the chromosomes of a June bug's sperm; then, between meat
and dessert, poems were read which satirized this very research. First
the gentlemen went to extremes of seriousness, then laughed. There was
no inner relationship. You might criticize my citing so extreme an
example of our civilization.
I cite it because it is characteristic, because it shows in a radical
manner the present-day relationship between cognition and art, namely,
no relationship at all. The gentlemen who made poems for the banquet
understood nothing of the scientific papers. It is not quite possible
to state the reverse, namely, that the worthy scientists did not understand
the poems, although the poets assumed this, for they considered their
work profound. But there is not much to be understood in such poetry
and it may, therefore, be inferred that even the illustrious gathering
understood it in some degree.

It is
highly important for our time to observe how a homogeneous human spiritual
life has been split into three parts which have fallen away from each
other. For there is now a most urgent necessity to recompose the whole.
If a philosopher speculates today about unity and doubleness, monism
and dualism, he does so with a neutral mind, marshaling abstract concepts
in defence of the one or the other. Both viewpoints can be proved equally
well. In the ages whose relationship to art has just been sketched,
a discussion of unity or duality, of the one with or without the other,
aroused all the forces of men's soul. Whether the world sprang from
an undivided source, or whether, on the contrary, good and evil are
two divided original powers, the battle between monism and dualism was
in bygone ages an artistic-religious concern which aroused all the forces
of the human soul, and upon which man felt that his welfare, his bliss,
depended. Though in former times he considered these questions closely
bound up with his salvation, today he speaks of them with indifference.
If we do not acquire a breath of the artistic-religious-cognitional soul
mood which once held sway, there will be no impulse toward the truly
great in art.

Still
another feeling lived in those ages. People spoke of the Soma drink,
of sunlight poured into the silver moon-chalice, the reality with which
they filled their souls in order to understand the secrets of the cosmos.
Speaking of the Soma drink, they felt themselves in direct soul communion
with the cosmos. Soul experiences took place simultaneously on earth
and in the cosmos. People felt that the gods revealed themselves through
fixed stars and orbiting planets. By forming images of themselves on
earth, the fixed star constellations and planetary movements made it
possible for the soul to experience a cosmic element. If it drank the
Soma drink and carried out sacrifices in a ritualistic-artistic-cognitional
manner, the soul gave back to the gods, in the rising smoke to which
it entrusted the religious-artistic-poetic, word, what the gods needed
for continued world creation. For the gods did not create man in vain;
he exists on earth in order that something which can be achieved only
by man may be used by the gods for further world creation. Man is on
earth because the gods need him. He is on earth so that he may think,
feel and will what lives in the cosmos. If he does it in the right way,
the gods can take this changed thing and implant it into the configuration
of the world.

Thus man —
if in sacrifice and art he gives back what the gods gave him —
cooperates in building the cosmos. He has a soul-connection with cosmic
evolution.

If we permeate
ourselves with a conception of this relationship within spiritual-physical
cosmic evolution, we can apply it to the present world. There we see
a cognition which wishes only to fashion matter, and which applies earthly
laws and calculations even to astro-chemistry and astronomy; a cognition
— the so-called scientific one — which holds good only for
earth evolution. But this cognition will cease to be of significance
to the degree that the earth is transformed into Jupiter, Venus, Vulcan.
To repeat: today “science” has only an earthly meaning; its
purpose is to help human beings to become free here on earth; but the
gods cannot use this science for the continued cosmic creation.

Abstract thoughts
are the ultimate abstraction, the corpse of the spirit world. What is
carried out scientifically has meaning only for the earth. Having acted
on earth as thought, it is shattered, buried; it does not live on.

In truth, what
Ursula Karin, grandmother of the poet Adalbert Stifter, told him about
the sunset glow belongs more intensively to the cosmos than what is
to be read today in scientific books. Take everything in those books
about the way sunlight acts on clouds to produce the evening glow, collect
everything described there as natural laws: it has an earthly significance
only. The gods cannot gather it up from earth to use it in the cosmos.
Adalbert Stifter's grandmother said to the boy: “Child, what is
the evening glow? Child, when it appears, the Mother of God is hanging
out her clothes; she has so many to hang out on the heavenly
dome.”

This is
an utterance on which the gods can draw for the further development
of the world. Modern science tries to describe in precise concepts what
exists now. But this will never become future; it is of the present.
But Adalbert Stifter's grandmother, having preserved much of what lived
in ancient souls, said something about which a modern scientist could
only smile. He might consider it beautiful, but would have no inkling
of the fact that her words are of greater significance for the cosmos
than all his vaunted science. From whatever is useful in this sense,
from whatever creates not space-and-time thoughts but eternally-active
thoughts, all true art has arisen. Just as the imagination of Adalbert
Stifter's grandmother, which made him a poet, is related to a dry
materialistic conception, so
Raphael's
Sistine Madonna,
which transcends
the moment, which seizes the moment for the eternal, is related to any
mother with her child seen here on the physical earth.

This
is what I wished to add to our previous considerations, hoping
to deepen them.